For Your Reconsideration: The 100 Greatest Performances that should have won
Oscars but didn't

Entertainment Weekly, 25 November 2002

He made his childhood acting debut in a Boy Scout play. And
for great swaths of his Hollywood career, James Stewart -- better known to
audiences as Jimmy, since he seemed so approachable -- went right on playing Boy
Scouts, wholesome, reasonable, aw-shucks kinds of fellows who stuttered and
drawled and stood knock-kneed before the opposite sex. That's probably why
Stewart remains such a revelation as sick puppy Scottie Ferguson, the
acrophobic, borderline-necrophilic detective in
Alfred Hitchcock's trailblazing
study of sexual dysfunction. (Follow the straight line to "Blue Velvet.")
Stewart's Scottie is sympathetic as he becomes attracted to an unfaithful wife
he's hired to tail. He's moving when he witnesses her apparent death. He's
creepy when he finds another woman he wants to make over in his dead amour's
image. And he's genuinely frightening when he discovers his love object may have
betrayed him -- all sweaty rants and shaking-hand-across-the-lip fury. It's a
thoroughly modern, adult performance. Nothing gee-whiz about it. Scout's honor.

2. Anthony Perkins, Psycho (1960)

"We all go a little mad sometimes." "She might have fooled
me, but she didn't fool my mother." No one can speak lines like these today
without reflexively resorting to "the psycho stutter" or "the psycho stare."
Such unnaturalness is only natural -- after a half century of serial-killer
movies, we share a template for knife-wielding loonies. Perkins, the pioneer,
had no such road map. For him, the tics were organic: He approached Norman Bates
as a character, not a trope. His murderous, mother-lovin' motelier is plenty
creepy, yes, but it's Perkins' disarming, oddball lack of self-consciousness
that makes you believe Janet Leigh wouldn't take off down the highway after one
look into those beady, birdlike eyes. No matter what he's doing -- sucking on a
piece of candy or methodically cleaning up a blood-spattered bathroom -- you
never doubt for an instant that the man is completely, utterly, and terrifyingly
at home.

In Pauline Kael's formulation,
Grant was the Man From Dream
City. The "city" bit is clear: His acrobatic urbanity -- the dance of dapper
sidesteps, teasing nods, streetwise shrugs -- is matchless. The content of the
"dream" is complex, as his elastic suavity accommodates all manner of
ambiguities. When, for instance, Grant dashes off his dashing lines, his verbal
aggression can seem driven by neurosis and his voice by the crack of a silken
whip. "The Philadelphia Story" is about a romance between
Katharine Hepburn
and Jimmy Stewart, and about
Grant -- as the odd man out -- being uncommonly
needy. His C.K. Dexter Haven is more desperate than his man on the run in
"North by Northwest." Rather cruel, rather too cool, he wears his
sophistication as if it were armor. It is rare to find
Cary Grant heartbroken,
and more rare yet to find an actor who can seem terribly lonely and still find
romance a jolly game.

When Bergman walks into Rick's Café, her Ilsa is "the most
beautiful woman ever to visit Casablanca." She pulls us in with a
simmering-below-the-surface eroticism and an un-Hollywood freshness that makes
her seem earthbound and attainable. And like all great screen actors, she made
the camera an accomplice. Watch her face, held in a tight, caressing close-up,
as Dooley Wilson's Sam first sings "As Time Goes By." A lesser actress might
have overemoted, but Bergman restricts expression to a minimum and just lets the
camera play across that gorgeous profile. It's one of those wonderfully
mysterious moments when an actor, seemingly by doing nothing, lets us imagine
everything. And remember this: As a costar she brought out a pained romanticism
in Humphrey Bogart that he'd never shown before nor would again. Likewise,
Bergman would never again be quite this luminous.

5. Samuel L. Jackson, Jungle Fever (1991)

Spike Lee's inner-city melodrama is ostensibly about an affair
between African-American architect Flipper (Wesley Snipes) and Italian-American
secretary Angela (Annabella Sciorra), but Samuel L. Jackson steals the movie as
Flipper's crackhead brother, Gator. In just five scenes, Jackson (who had
completed real-life drug rehab mere months before filming) beams a lifetime of
hurt and rage through his eyes. Wheedling money from his doormat of a mother
(Ruby Dee) and tragically menacing his fallen-pastor father (Ossie Davis) with a
devilish dance, Jackson fearlessly conjures his character's inner demons. The
Cannes film festival created a special best-supporting-actor prize for his work,
but the Academy snubbed him. Yet in the end, Jackson's harrowing turn as Gator
lifted him out of the swamp of bit-part actors and helped make him a king of the
Hollywood jungle.

6. Susan Sarandon, Bull Durham (1988)

What kind of a woman could steal a movie about one of
America's most testosterone-filled pastimes, the mustache-adorned, tobacco-spittin',
butt-pattin' sport of baseball? The kind of impeccably funny, lust-lidded siren
that Susan Sarandon became in this role. With a Southern drawl as comfortable as
a well-oiled glove, Sarandon's Annie Savoy takes on the local minor-league
franchise's most promising player each season, educating him in love and "life
wisdom." Combining smoldering sensuality with a gentle, protective nature, the
actress slides without a drop of sweat from advising her charge (Tim Robbins) on
the unfastening of garters to the wonders of Walt Whitman. An actress of less
depth would have bobbled Annie Savoy's complexity, but Sarandon turns her into
"Bull Durham"'s most valuable player.

7. John Cazale, The Godfather Part 2 (1974)

Michael got the brains, Sonny got the brawn, but Fredo --
poor, forlorn Fredo -- what did he get? Passed over. With Mike (Al Pacino) now
in charge, the middle Mafia child is all impotence. The guy can't even betray
right. Pitiable, but Cazale never plays it like that. He's awkward and sweet,
and so very mournful of the old days (watch him glow like a sickly moon when he
spots a friend from back East). When he finally blurts his reasons for turning
on his brother, it's with the resentment of a child. "I'm not dumb! I'm smart
and I want respect!" he bellows, wobbling helplessly on a patio chair. Thanks
to Cazale, who made just six movies, all great, before his death at 42, Fredo
got the heart -- and the good and bad that go with it.

We all know ''The
Wizard of Oz'' is chockful of heart, brains, and courage, but the girl who
made the whole thing dance was Garland.
The 17-year-old had big shoes to fill working alongside old pros like Jack Haley
(Tin Man), Ray Bolger (Scarecrow),
and Bert Lahr (Lion), but her wide-eyed innocence and powerful voice are what
truly brought the film over the rainbow. (They also helped land
Garland a specially created Juvenile
Award at the 1940 Oscars, a kiddie-table honor that's no longer passed out.)
Later in life, Garland would lose
the innocence and concentrate more on her singing career. And though she could
still light up a screen on occasion (most notably in 1954's ''Star Is Born''),
to find one of cinema's most indelible performances, you must backtrack down the
yellow brick road.

She drove everyone nuts. She arrived late on set, flubbed her
lines, and deferred to her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, over director
Billy
Wilder. But she was Marilyn Monroe. And she was worth it. Though
Wilder didn't
have Monroe in mind at first (he assumed the part was too small for such a
megastar), Sugar Kane, the ukulele-strumming, bourbon-swigging sexpot, is
nothing if not pure Marilyn. Her wide-eyed, blissful sensuality is the perfect
counterpart to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon's drag show and confirmed what many
already knew from 1955's "The Seven Year Itch": that
Monroe was a gifted
comedian who sparkled more vibrantly than all of Sugar's sequined dresses
stitched together. When she breathily boop-boop-be-doops in the middle of "I
Wanna Be Loved by You," you have to wonder what fool wouldn't wanna be loved by
her.

10. Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet (1986)

He got a supporting-actor nomination -- his lone nod to date
-- for appearing in "Hoosiers" the very same year, but who talks much about
"Hoosiers" now (outside of Indiana)? The Hopper character most likely to have
left a permanent scar on your cerebral cortex is Frank Booth, the profane,
fabric-swatch-loving sadist who lurks in the alternate-universe backwaters of
"Blue Velvet." Before writer-director David Lynch unleashed Frank, we'd never
seen a villain inflict quite such a queasy mix of physical, verbal, and sexual
abuse on a victim. It's still hard to watch Frank's initial tryst with singer
Dorothy Vallens, who, as played by Isabella Rossellini, seems both terrified and
turned on. And as Frank swigs Pabst Blue Ribbon and huffs nitrous oxide, it's
also hard not to think about Hopper's own battles with drugs and booze, adding
to the tightrope tension. Improbably, Hopper finds a kernel of humor in Frank's
inchoate rage. But we freeze in our seats, imagining Frank reading our thoughts,
turning and snarling "Funny how, f---er?"